Your House Style
We create a house style to match your brand so documents are produced quickly without need to spend time on formatting and numbering.
You will want your team of people to work consistently and not waste time reinventing the wheel each time they want to produce a document. A house style sets out the rules of formatting, in a similar way you would have brand guidelines.
A house style provides more than a coherent structure to your Word documents; it enables a culture of ‘this is how we do things here’ because it sets out the rules of your brand.
Without a house style people will notice your poor document formatting.
Creating and designing your house style
We work with you to design and implement a house style across all of your documents which helps your legal and secretarial teams to work efficiently in their Word documents. Creating a template that uses your house style reduces the risk of errors and is a key part of the Best Practice principles we train.
A template is the very foundation of a Word document, and a house style template includes your preferred numbering schemes and format, and fonts and spacing in accordance with your firm’s brand.
Numbering is a key part of a document. Sometimes you will want numbering to be continuous (1, 2, 3) and sometimes you want numbering to restart so that you see paragraphs 1(a), 1(b) and then 2(a) and 2(b).
And if you want bold on your headings, you can apply that manually in a 2 page document, but if your document is 50 pages, it will take a long time to manually bold all those headings.
If you are having problems with numbering in your document, or the way your headings appear, it will be your template that is causing the issue.
We create a template for you so that your numbering always works and your headings look how you expect them to. We also give you with a Style Guide for your documents and can train your teams to demonstrate just how easy it is when your Word documents are built on a solid foundation.
Get started with our
easy steps...
1
Send us a document which shows your preferred formatting.
2
Send us your most frequent used documents for us to review.
3
You decide how many documents we can format for you and choose a training time.
FAQs
What is needed in a house style?
Good document processing needs consistency, so we look at all of the formatting requirements we can build into Word Styles.
A starting point is the font size and type, line spacing, colour, and numbering schemes.
The rules of formatting can go to greater detail but that all depends on you. Some companies decide how they want their date format to appear in letters, documents, column headings. Some decide if they use punctuation in abbreviations.
Do I need a new template?
Microsoft Word is a complex application so we always recommend a review of the templates and documents that you are currently using.
Once we know how your templates are constructed we can either work with them as they are and reformat to your house style, or we may suggest a re-write so that numbering schemes and formatting can be applied correctly.
Is it difficult to learn how to use a new template?
Far from it. Our job is to make it easier for you to apply formatting to your documents and easier for your teams to use too.
If we create a new template and new house style for you, you will receive supporting documentation and one-to-one training.
What Our Customers Think
The comprehensive training solution for Word has helped our office efficiency.
We have immediately felt the benefit of training – now providing our clients with perfectly formatted documents more efficiently than ever before.
Get In Touch
Phone
020 3409 7040
Address
The Old School, 188 Liscard Road, Wallasey, CH44 5TN.
info@bluebird.services